According to the journalist Sennen Andriamirado, who wrote two early books on Sankara, the Burkinabè leader believed that “Stalin killed Leninism by stifling the soviets and making all-powerful the Cheka [secret police], the military,” and other repressive bodies.

Hmm, I wonder if protecting the socialist leadership was a factor in this. Too bad he got assassinated, proving that using state power to oppose the reactionary forces is critically important in a nascent socialist state.

The majority of people who lived in Eastern European socialism regret its fall. The USSR had no colonies, it was an anti-imperialist, de-colonial federation. Sankara learned from Stalin, and was a Marxist-Leninist. Finally, equating Hitler and Stalin equates fascism with socialism, which originated as a form of Holocaust trivialization called Double Genocide Theory. I recommend reading Domenico Losurdo's Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism.

For example, Thomas Sankara was an actual decent person

That's cool that being nice is the ceiling of revolutionary possibility in your brutally constrained mind, but the Chinese Communists did this: